A universe like ours with a world like earth but there exists an energy that we do not know. It is a strange energy able to mimic matter and other energies and perform similar chemical reactions allowing it to affect and be affected by the physical world. In this universe the laws of physics developed the same as ours and in this world life flourished in a similar direction but with this energy special curiosities occurred. In this world humanity developed as the first of only two naturally developed intelligent races and thus they were granted souls allowing them to transcend the order and predictability of nature and destiny. The second race though was one being, the energy, with its unique properties it exhibited patterns similar to brainwaves and developed its own intelligence and gained itself a soul. The energy grew watching the world and the creatures within it but most importantly humans, learning and growing in intelligence and this lasted for thousands( or millions or billions) of years until the energy decided to act. If it could form from itself could anything else.

  It decided to start with the smallest of creatures, bacteria, and found it all too easy so it decided to move on. Next it tried plant and small animals like squirrels, rabbits, and snakes, it succeeded, then it tried larger animals such as boars, tigers, and rinos it still did not fail, after succeeding to make even the largest of animals even those of sky and sea it decided to finally move on to what it thought was the hardest, humans. No matter how hard it tried though it failed again and again. It decided to gain more experience by not just copying but modifying animals into what it saw as better but despite succeeding in that it still failed at making humans. It again decided to go back and tried infusing its creations with the energy that made itself at normal levels but also in specific frequencies with the most common and naturally found types being called the elements, it succeeded but still could not make humans. During this it created what it called demi (or inferior) humans which looked similar to humans but not quite complete which would cause it to mutate into many different races which would be called things such as goblins, trolls, and other such things. Again It went back and decided to just randomly create beings to see if anything would work and finally it succeeded, with pain. It had accidentally ripped of a piece of its own soul and it was in pain, it was suffering, but it was happy for it had finally succeeded in what had frustrated it for so long and understood where it went wrong, it needed souls to create real intelligent beings so it studied what a soul was, how it worked.

  A blueprint of who you are written by your life, your memories, your personality, your experience and skills, even your DNA, everything you are recorded in the soul. When a child is fertilized the soul, similar to DNA, is created by the combination of two small pieces of the parent's soul broken off and combined together with the areas recording who the person is, such as personality, memories, and information remaining blank with abilities being very rarely inherited. The soul allows intelligent beings to better learn skills and abilities but there is a limit. While an unlimited amount of info can be recorded in the soul if the soul is too small all the info must be compressed to make room for more so the smaller the soul and the more you learn the harder it is to learn even more but it will never be impossible. There are a few normal ways to increase what you can learn, one is to live life, because a soul automatically increases in size over time the longer you live the more you can learn. Another way is experience, experience can forge the soul to be stronger making it easier to compress info, but it usually is too small to matter except life and death experience fighting for your life and getting closer to death imposes on your soul straining it, your soul will heal back stronger. This can be considered the best way to naturally strengthen the soul but there is a more effective but dangerous way, traumas, they strain the soul the fastest and hardest and if you can survive this you will come out much stronger, but the consequences of even succeeding may not be worth it let alone if you fail. Succeeding in overcoming a trauma can very likely cause imperfections or permanent fractures in the soul that can be near impossible to heal making you lose memories and skills if you are unlucky and make it easier for the soul to fall apart in the future. If you fail the soul will fall apart entirely which can be considered impossible to heal which in itself could cause death but even worse an ever tormented life of a broken existence. Through its studies it discovered a way to artificially improve a soul with the very energy that made it up by passing it through the soul and different speeds, densities, size and patterns it could improve the soul in differing ways and specific areas increasing size to store more information and skills but it also It noticed a strange phenomenon where in strengthening certain aspects of the soul could improve those aspects of the physical body. You can’t just strengthen the soul all you want though too much to fast could lead to a collapse of the soul, too large without strengthening and it is not strong enough to maintain itself, too much strengthening and it becomes fragile like a diamond but differing types and levels of strengthening and a larger size to spread it over can alleviate this effect.

  Through studying and conjecture It believed that the soul was the “code of the universe” to make it easier to understand, There was one for everything in existence detailing how they worked but they belonged to the universe and because of this the universe worked like a program, predictable, this is, you could say, destiny and by granting the soul to intelligent beings they could now “control” their “Destiny” even without being conscious of the soul but since the soul also detailed how a subject physically manifested by changing the soul you could change the subject. By strengthening the part of the soul that detailed a person's strength their actual strength would thus increase. To better understand this concept It decided to group some of the more important attributes of a being into different groups with easy explanations (though the names and explanations can be said to not be even close to what it is describing): Strength,Speed, stamina/endurance,Defence, Resistance, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, Regeneration, Charisma, and Ability (explanations found in Attribute/stat section). It likened the strengthening of the soul to cultivating bacteria so it named the action Cultivation and decided to nickname Attributes, Stats because they are the statistics of a living being. After discovering this It thought to modify the soul because it had a few objectives in mind the first of all being two new stats, one it names Soul to allow the production of its own energy as well as other additions to go along with that and Luck: the ability to affect “destiny”. Following this it decided to finally design and create new intelligent races.

  Before going that far it decided to finally make humans giving them pieces of its soul with the new changes, which, after mingling with the natural humans would give humanity the ability to harness the energy, then It moved on to slight changes to humans in this case making them more suited to a stat, though it decided not to make the change to drastic, but also to counter balance it with a decrease in other stats, because it did not want any of its creations destroying any others. To differentiate these changed beings it changed their outward appearance as well and some of these beings came to be known as elfs, dwarves, and more. He then made beings that contained physical traits of animals that it named the beastman. These beings had greater physical attributes than humans and usually without the penalties to other and at the same time a greater affinity to a certain element of the energy, sometimes multiple, and these are determined by the animal they were based on but the downside to all of this being that they have an extremely reduced affinity to any other element and a slightly harder time increasing attributes the animal they are based on are not suited towards and thus lack the versatility of humans. The first being It made with its soul on accident it also placed in this group, a being later named dragons, and gave them the ability to take on humanoid forms. These being were special in that they had increased physical; and magical abilities without any decrease in any of its stats or element affinities (though they figured out later in history how to sacrifice their elemental affinities to greatly increase a single one) so the energy decided to greatly reduce their reproduction ability to counter this advantage. The energy also made a similar group of beings made off of plants though less in number

  The societies in this world after these actions bagan to use the energy in their daily lives as magic, any use of this energy to produce a Phenomenon, and called specific “Programs” within magic to produce a specific repeatable phenomena, spells. These included creating fire and other things found in nature to healing or enhancing living beings, but also, for those with malicious intent, even mind control, anything is possible. The more complicated the desired task the more energy is needed to complete then power the spell but more importantly is the knowledge on how to create that phenomena. Since even the most basic laws of physics were not really well known to the people of this world the energy created a solution to circumvent this. It did this by designing a spell where a one way artificial soul bridge was created between the Energys soul and the spell they are creating allowing them to utilize the Energys knowledge in their spells, though it made certain knowledge restricted.

  The beings actions caused many changes within the world itself and the societies built by humans. In society the energy was treated as a godlike being and one progenitor, or the first of the races made by the energy, being made into the leaders of each race. These Progenitors were immortal because even if they had their minds and personalities separated from the being their souls still had some connection and with how powerful the energy was it was immortal and subsequently so were they but their children did not gain this luxury though. With the introduction of how to strengthen themselves through their soul was when the humans truly treated It as their god and gave It the Manna shortened to just one n, Mana, meaning the sustenance of god for how the energy that made It up could provide “sustenance” for their souls. The greatest change that Mana introduced though was to the environment. When Mana was testing its ability to make living beings it created many plants with specific elemental affinities and these plants mostly only survived in areas that naturally had a greater than normal amount of this element. At this time there weren't many places with a greater concentration of a specific element because the energy tended to stay in it’s unchanged neutral state but this changed after the introduction of these new plants. They could only live in an environment with their own element in this but because this was so limited they soon evolved the ability to change the Mana in their environment to a specific element by attuning it to a sample they collected from their environment. While these plants could use this newly changed Mana as sustenance and also release it to their environment to spread farther they luckily couldn’t use this artificially changed energy to make more instead needing a natural sample and thus couldn’t spread forever. This means that throughout the world are many pockets of environments heavily attuned to a specific element or elements creating bazaar environments and Phenomenon and collections and Animals drawn to this environment.

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  Another thing that became important in society was caused by the changes Mana made in the body structure of its Humanoid beings when implementing the soul attribute, these were nodes. While special pores were created to allow Mana to enter and exit the body anywhere certain large strengthened pores called Mana nodes were created on the body to allow for large and energetic streams of energy to enter and exit the body where otherwise they could cause damage. These had a part for entry and exit and were important because of the use of magic equipment to temporally strengthen the body. You see while most spells that affect living beings and are not direct attacks are either instant cast, containing the program and battery together that enter the body through these nodes and work their, or are spells that, while they do stream mana into the body, are slow or gentle enough to enter the body through the regular pores. Strengthening spells are the former when cast by a person, usually, but when placed on equipment the battery is kept within the item and streams that through the nodes to the Program contained just within. This means that if two of these types of streams try to enter a single node they will conflict with each other and end up with only one spell program being powered. Other types of magic, such as instant cast magic, can enter through these nodes without conflicting because it only takes an instant but for strengthening equipment there can only be one per node

  While the world lived ideally for quite a while in this era with Mana constantly interacting with the humanoids and even creating many artificial intelligences to research the possibilities of magic it did not last forever. You see there was a big problem in the society Mana created and that was beauty standards. The humanoids Mana created, being based off of humans, and the humans themselves had the same standard of beauty, one that some of the races did not fall under. Most of these races were insectoids and arachnids, though some races outside these groups were included and some races within this group were not, and because of this they were heavily ostracized by society and called Demons. Over time the hate in these races built up until they decided to finally retaliate. They researched for millennia until they found a way to “corrupt” Mana. This ability had a very limited application and strict requirements and, ultimately, could only be done because the Progenitors of these groups still had that connection to Mana’s soul. This corruption spread through Mana and allowed the Demon Progenitors to gain control of Mana's soul and use it to fuel the growth of their leaders soul’s to gain godlike powers that they planned to use to destroy the other races. Before they got even close to done, Though, Mana noticed and acted. When Mana tried to stop the Corruption it noticed it could not, this intrigued Mana but, for the first time, scared it. It feared what would happen to it, but even more it feared what the demons would do to the rest of its creations. The only thing it could do was break off the pieces of its soul that were corrupted giving the demons that power, and while this did stop the corruption it also led to the collapse of its soul. With the rest of its soul collapsing Mana did two things, first was to give an equal amount of soul to the leaders of the other races to gain similar powers and the second was to implement a project it was working on since it had worked on since it first learned to manipulate the souls of the universe and had been waiting for the right occasion, something it called the system.

  This was something incorporated into the universe itself, a program designed to allow easier and more efficient growth of the humanoids Mana called this the System. The most basic function of the system was the Character sheet, a list of a person's stats, skills, and traits as a way for beings to monitor them and see their own growth and weaknesses. Both stats and skills have been quantified on this sheet by Mana and while they cannot be said to be exact they are a good indicator of a person's growth and are the same for every being. Stats, on this sheet, are quantified by the strength of an attribute while skills are quantified by mastery. Skills are separated into levels and as an incentive to focus on increasing skill mastery and not just stats Mana decided to enforce these skills with a magical support such as how the accuracy and bow mastery skills can increase the distance any projectile and an arrow respectively can travel.

  The main feature of the system though was its growth system. Mana did this in a special way by granting various of the more powerful and magical but non intelligent beings of the world slivers of their own soul, with the stronger they are the larger the piece, and any humanoids that had the system could kill these beings, which were named monsters, and the soul of the being killed would have its access shaved off and refined into energy which would be given to the being or beings that killed it in the form of XP. This XP, once enough is collected, causes the being to “Level Up” in that the soul energy is converted into two things, Stat Points and Skill points. First of all skill can be used to increase your mastery of a skill while stat points come in two forms.

  The first form of stat points is free points and this is one type of form the soul can be converted to and while it is the most versatile and can be used to increase any stat it is also the most inefficient and takes more of the XP to make. Each level up gives you the same number of free points for every being but depending on race more of these points are needed to increase a stat they are weak in or each point can increase a stat to a greater degree if they are more suited to it. For each level up though more XP is needed for the same number of points because more energy is needed to strengthen an already strengthened soul. To make sure personal effort is still reworded Mana made it so that if a person strengthened their soul through personal need the amount of XP needed to increase your level would not change and just be supplemented by the system but increasing through the system would still make personal increases harder.

  The other form these stat points came in was direct stats that are affected by two things the first being that a person can just pre assign free points into certain stat points so that apon leveling up the XP would be directly converted into that stat and not waste energy on being made into free points and while this means they get more stats out of the XP they lose versatility because free points can be kept forever without being made into stats and saved for emergencies while direct stats cannot. The other way though is through the use of Classes/Jobs. These are like upgrading a computer's CPU or RAM (or whatever IDK computers) and make the conversion of direct, and if it is good enough, free stats more efficients. These classes are separated into different grades based on how efficiently they convert XP into both stat and skill points and come with a great variety within each grade depending on what stats they focus on and how many free points they use.

  Along with the collection of XP Mana decided to do two things to monsters, the first is an extra incentive to humanoids in that the excess mana contained in a monsters body when killed has a chance to be condensed into objects that can be used by humanoids such as currency of varying types and amounts, weapons or tools, extra usable materials, and even special items called skill books which are used to teach anyone who opens them a skill or spell instantly with all these being based on the monster killed. The other thing was a type of payment to the monsters for making them a target by giving them a system of evolution. This system worked by getting rid of classes and free points and assigning direct stat points and skill points randomly but with a higher chance to get them put in stats and skills more useful for them based on their race and actions. When these monsters level up enough though they are allowed to evolve into a greater being that is dependent on their previous race and their actions, stat balance, and skill list and mastery and the higher ranked evolutions have a more efficient point conversion. All of that though is in preparation of the most important part which is gaining another piece of their soul making it larger and once they collect their whole soul from various evolutions they will be given complete humanoid form, though some could get close in form before the final evolution like a bird turning into a harpy, a being with a human torso but bird feet and wings for arms, and once these monsters reach this stage they will be given the same system as other humanoids and a class unique to the races they were, skills learned, and actions taken.

  The death of mana caused many things and created some things new. The First of course is the, what would later be known as, gods of both demons and the humanoids and the religions that came from them. Another type of being that was created was the elemental spirits. During the collapse and fragmentation of Mana’s soul some of the smaller fragments managed to stabilize themselves into individual beings and afterwords to escape the corruption most of them attuned their being to more specific types of mana most of these to a single element but some to multiple but some of these fragments went differently. The first of these managed to stay pure mana by developing a resistance to the corruption, sometimes even an advantage over it becoming more opposing to its nature, these were called light and holy elements respectively. The next is technically two types as well the first are spirits that managed to harness the power of the corruption for themselves by tuning the nature of their mana closer to it and managed to keep their individuality while the other failed to escape the corruption and became servants of the demon gods and while they are similar beings and both called Dark spirits they are fundamentally different.

  A consequence of his death was with magic. Previously Mana provided his own knowledge in Mortal's use of magic and this worked because its soul was whole and everywhere, now it is not. To access this knowledge the previous soul connection used must be greatly enhanced to reach it and maintain it and the greater and more complicated the knowledge the more is needed. This greatly increased the requirements to use magic and thus a lot less people used it. To counteract this many methods were used to make it easier such as the use of chants as instructions or magic circles as a programming language and research into physics but since it was previously neglected this fell behind. The biggest consequence though was the many wars that came about because of this both between the gods and the mortals and the many deaths that came from them.